Sybil attacks on airdrops

I think at this stage it's impossible to fairly distribute a coin to new users.

Bitcoin was born into a unique environment. The world did not know what to think, and largely ignored it, so it was able to spread organically for years, detached from any notion it would ever be worth anything. Because it had no value, it could grow without having to worry about these kinds of attacks. Only once it spread far enough did it begin to take on economic value and an exchange rate, reaching one penny and beyond.

Airdrops these days do the exact opposite. They're premined, listed day 1 on exchanges, and the creators try to pump the exchange rate in order to finance later development. The entire process is corrupted by users viewing projects through an economic lens, and creators trying to extract value before delivering value. Now that the cat is out of the bag, it's likely the conditions of bitcoin's creation will never happen again.

Another funny example is the one of Juno: a whale Sybil-ed the airdrop, and gathered 10% of the tokens. Then, the community voted to strip the whale of most of their tokens.

I find the example interesting because it shows that Layer 2 protocols can very much strip you away from your coins, just like banks/governments can.

(https://beincrypto.com/juno-community-votes-to-reject-tokens...)

I'm reminded of this scene from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. In theory, the goal of the airdrop is to create new users, but in practice the airdrop receivers just cash out their chips and go home.

https://youtu.be/cyxxE1AcUSM

It's an interesting problem and one that many decentralized applications will be forced to contend with, beyond simple airdrops. Many on-chain protocols and primitives simply don't need to differentiate between human user and program, but the ones that do are usually crippled if they fail to adequately do so. Quadratic funding mechanisms, for example.

I believe we're still very early on this front, there's lots of opportunity for innovation in terms of Sybil defense. Dox Your Customer is the easiest and naturally the most at odds with the Web3 paradigm, but there are others that make fewer compromises which have been tried with varying levels of success. Vouch networks/social graphs, attestation or reputation systems, video identity registries, recurring cost, time-coordinated Turing tests, etc.

I am certain novel approaches will continue to emerge until we land on something robust without sacrificing decentralization or the right to privacy.

I am a research engineer at a Defi company and we wrote this script. That being said we don't intend on an airdrop at this point in time. But it's an easy to use to tool to quantify sybil interactions if anyone is curious. https://github.com/primitivefinance/sybil-detection

I'm suprised that Gitcoin was not mentioned, they have dealt with sybil attacks and have processes to try and detect it.

Seems like if protocols don't provide any liquidity for their tokens, but the tokens can be used to have access to a protocol revenue, I don't see the problem.

Except for most tokens/protocols don't have any revenue they can share with token holders…

I'm partial, because I work for them, but maybe use https://fractal.id/?

cheap transactions also makes mixing crypto cheaper

The attack surface of Apple’s products grow day-by-day with features meant to make life convenient.